the Gilded Cage
by Gender Outlaw
Summary: The memory of flying was in his bones still.' - SasuNaru


_the gilded cage opened and streams of life drifted outward.  
the eyes of the peacock watched intently and knew freedom was at hand.  
fire burned all 'round promising to ignite and threatening to consume,  
still the eyes of the peacock watched._

- Kayce Hughlett, at Diamonds in the Sky With Lucy

* * *

**the Gilded Cage**

* * *

The door slammed shut behind him with a thud and a rising wall of dust that billowed from the layers of falling warped cardboard boxes, and bounced once furtively with a sudden motion that Naruto stilled abruptly by falling against it.

He gasped and choked, his breathes coming in short uneven gasps that hitched with coming hiccups.

He had bright eyes and skin that glowed, and a heavy discoloration of blues and black across his face. Long red marks, scratches, followed the tension of his shoulders and neck as he glanced wildly back and forth through the room with predator's eyes, hunting..

He was lost. Even Sasuke could see this, beyond the stiring sweep of dust that yet tried to fall back to the floor and rise to the sky in the same moments. The room was gilded in cages and old boxes.

There was a eerie feeling to the whole of it, the room so enclosed that be there windows, Naruto could see no sign of them past the age and rot and growing piles of forgotten artifacts. Be you lover of the domesticated wild or mover of dreams? Boxes and cages.

Though the silence pounded against his chest, his back, Naruto made no move. Waiting, watching. Fighting to breathe.

The world around them shut off completely.

Sasuke, across the room, wove his way to the center like only Arachne and her legendary skill with the web. His fingers entwining about the bars of the cages around him in a calm way, unhurried. He stopped, as motionless as Naruto, lacking the same inhuman paralysis.

Sasuke called out in the language without words, a motion that is understood between boundaries of speech.

Naruto stared out of his own memories, hearing but nothing and seeing faces in every reflection.

And in the distance, the dogs began to howl, a furious, blood-hungry wail of lust and rage.

* * *

_("I have known for a very long time that the king is not my father," he said. "But I tried hard to be his son all the same." )_

- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

* * *

A mighty bird of deep red feathers, as though coated from a ever-open wound, Kyuubi made no cry of distress but bit his new owner soundly and deeply, fluffing his feathers in such a fit that his cage rattled in his fury.

Naruto ignored the cries and moved about the anger, adding more water to the bird's dishes, and minding that his blood fell nowhere. Not on animal, not in smoothly tempered steel.

Behind him, awakening calls started to usher from rows and rows of cages cast in solid iron. Layer of layer of moving shadow, the dawn was slowly growing.

* * *

_("They will need time to feel comfortable with flowers," he said.)_

- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

* * *

"Go to sleep .. " Sasuke whispered, slipping in soft unrecognizeable sounds between his words that _might_ have been almost human. He bent over the top of Naruto's bed, and wrapped a blanket carefully around him - smiling at the way that blonde hair fell.

He kissed the top of the boy's head with a smile so strong it could be felt even unseen, and left the room quietly, slipping away like a ghost in the night. His hand brushing across the door in a such way that swung it almost all the way closed. The barest crack lighting a sharp line into the pure darkness of isolation.

The light from the next room cut around Naruto in a way that should have been frightening. It lined itself against the floor, a single solider against a wall of black, a dying man drowning in his own blood. But Naruto was not afraid.

He sat up, and listened.

* * *

_(The song she sang to him was a melancholy tune of murder and hatred.)_

- Catch 22, by The Sh33p.

* * *

Sasuke's voice was pleasant between shimmering yellow curtains, plush cushions, and warm wooden floors. The lamps softened into hard edges of sharp corners, hid the danger.

All around them, the storm raged, thunder and blue-gray clouds swirling in resolution. The space beyond the windows unpassable - all deeping shadows and lanes that only looked calm and safe. The wild abandonment of sanity thrashed itself inches from those walls.

Sasuke lead the officer, the trusting man in all his blue and patience, to the other end of the house. Things slipped softly between his words, making their way unnoticed. They cooed and crawled into the shadows where they were not seen.

Chocolate cookies, stacks of them, hoards of them, they must have been reproducting like caged rabbits in the spaces between, all these Sasuke thrust onto the man again and again. Hands furiously consuming one after the other, all smiles, only laughter, until it was but all he could do not to drop the whole of it.

Naruto could still see them, at moments, as Sasuke slid the gun out from behind his back.

Laughing.

* * *

_(she does not know  
she is animal-_

as he is, sniffing-)

- Witness, by Dana Levin.

* * *

Naruto moved between the light, to where Sasuke kneeled in the dirt. The rain-soaked mud as dark as blood. The trees faceless giants watching silently. Sasuke, digging in his own front yard.

"You have something.. on your chin." Naruto spoke in a soft tone that crept further along past him, moving when he had stopped, trendils of snakes etching further ahead. Somewhere between whispers and echoes.

Sasuke looked up in surprise, his hands covered with the night.

Naruto was lit from the side by the filtered of light lamps hiding safely indoors. The pale illuminance etching past the barest space of windows, framing the world around them in soft sketches.

Naruto's blanket was cast hazardly about him as if it were the dimmed robe of a lost king. The wind moving threateningly within the trees around them, screeching. Verbalizing in words all its own the extend of hatred.

His mouth lifted, flashes of teeth, his cheeks turning upwards. All the lines smoothing out like river stones. And he knelt down beside Sasuke to kiss the stains away.

* * *

_("You are quick for what you are," he said, "but slow, I think, for what you were. It is said that love makes men swift and women slow. I will catch you at last if you love much more.")_

- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

* * *

The memory of flying was in his bones still.

That ever-present aspect of total freedom, of absolute isolation and silence but for the amicable wind sliding through his feathers, he remembered it all.

All night and all day Kyuubi fought, was fighing yet, thrashing and raging and tearing himself to pieces as he saw his own freedom dancing on the window sills. His eyesight never dimmed, saw even now everything, every mote of dust, every beam of sunlight.

His wing was battered and broken from slamming again and again against his cage, small tufts of bent feathers wedged impossibly in the cracks between. The solid iron decorated with the brilliant red as if it were all intentional.

Naruto lifted the lock and opened the door, and the bird fell off it's perch into his open - waiting - palms, those dark dark eyes of the beast still seeing, still fighting, even as the body submitted past his control..

* * *

_(For a long time I expected Tobias to ask me the question that must have haunted him day and night: whether it would ever be possible for him to escape his hawk's body. But he never did.)_

- Animorphs - The Alien, by K.A. Applegate.

* * *

Naruto was hiding behind a wall of warped cardboard, twisted and stacked so that the light had to bend around it, twisting and warping just the same.

It was noonday and only the dust in the corners behind him managed to hold onto the dusk, gray turning the area around him into an almost haunted mockery of a cavern as he crouched and peered through the spaces between.

He could see between a narrow line of the boxes, saw the boys from his own school walk in right through the front door of the shop, laughing and jostling each other in such a way Naruto's bones cracked with the tension of holding back.

Naruto was far beyond their reach now, on the other end of the store, where the echoes hid and slept and dust mated in ways only age can bring. The rusted cages, piled backwards forwards and sideways about the whole wall, hid his hair in perfect matrimony of old gold.

His eyes followed them as they started moving between a row of cages near the front, animals stacked upon animals in an act of balance and shrieking feathers. They bleed easily into the wild of domesticated violence, becoming almost lost themselves.

Naruto's eyes narrowed like a cut when their voices began to grow.

* * *

_(".. In the dream I'm in my tiger morph. And I'm stalking Tom. Following him. On his trail. I'm feeling the tiger's eagerness. You know, that predator feeling. The hunger. The desire to kill.")_

- Animorphs - The Capture, by K.A. Applegate.

* * *

When nine years had surrounded him, Naruto was walking behind the school while a wind whispered over his feet, and headed for the rusty set of swings he still remembered from a time before the world of words.

Several small golden fish danced intricately, almost intimately in a puddle of mud that stretched for more than twice the width that Naruto was tall.

On the other side of the world, on the other side of the brick-red schoolhouse there was laughter and joy and children playing and he knew this. He knew this all, just as well as he knew the world around him was large and partly unformed, sproating up crooked about him just as the tall oaks blotting out his shadow.

There was nothingness, there was silence, and Naruto found a sort of peace in the isolation of perfect stillness. Of perfect seculsion. Familar quarantine. Neglect beginning to burn its way under his skin, smoldering with him as of yet unaware.

And he stopped, in innocence, to watch the moving acts gold, tails weaving in a chorus of movement, while the world fell down in around him in pieces of orange and dim red autumn, and Naruto wondered if those small remembrances of living light knew exactly what their world was.

Where they were. Already dying.

* * *

_("What could we have done to save the unicorns? We were afraid of the Red Bull. What could we have done?"_

"One word might have been enough," King Lír replied. "You'll never know now.")

- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle.

* * *

The fire spread like a fever, all intensity and blazing so brilliant it was almost pure. Flawless light, faultless death. Instantaneous. And it consumed like a hungry boar, sweeping over the layered dust and the crying fading patches of still caged skin, resonating to freedom.

Sasuke pushed Naruto with such violence across the still yet unconsumed expanse of room, and wrestled with the latch on the window. The warped and twisted lock protecting the winding flames from danger melting into the wood and plastic.

Naruto watched him almost in disinterest, leaning against the wall beside, heat threading through his hair and curling the ends up.

He studied the way Sasuke's eyes of blue so _so _dark kept glancing behind them, around them, at the walls of raging flames surrounding them, and thought that those wonderously blue eyes looked like a sky split in two.

His mouth moved, and Naruto said the words with such certainty that it was a prayer in his hands. A folding bloom that he released with a soft smile.

"I won't forget you."

Sasuke spun so sharply that his finger slipped off the lock, ruptured open the flesh, and gazed at Naruto in something like wonder. And all around the birds _screamed_ in final disrepair, already doomed. Already lost. The red of the fire tearing through bones and blood.

Sasuke did not answer, words failing him as they do all humans eventually, and turned again to the bent latch, blood mauling his attempts as he ripped the broken lock off, peeling and blistering wood splintering right off alongside.

He threw the window open, glass cracking in the presence of total domination. Of absolute heat. Of pure desperation. Naruto was lifted, unprotesting, into the air and pushed against the small surface of opening. Almost too small a gap to be passed.

And Naruto was shoved backwards out though unguarded air, spinning and twisting as he fell into a form of flight from the upper story window, spreading out his arms to catch the wind. To fly. His fingers opening as if they were sliding feathers, seeking to be lifted, to be raised above. To absolute freedom.

The smoke streamed and billowed behind him as if it were a cape he wore, garbed across his shoulders and waist, lacing around his body. Smoke meet foliage as Naruto landed on a bed of leaves. Landed and bounced, all around him the world was echoing in distant intensity, tranquil gray smoke and amicable autumn.

But in his mind was still the way Sasuke's hands slid over him, like a whisper..

And above, having seen what he sought to find, Sasuke rose from the edge of a window that would not allow him and went for his gun, darting around the crumbling pieces of his home as the blaze erupted further through the rooms. Exploding embers and thrusting fragments of wood.

He walked swiftly through it all, the flames in their frenzied dance almost seeming to part around him. Grabbing the automatic weapon off a table so deep in the inferno that the metal burned his skin in permanent patterns of scorched red. And he moved off to the end of the world.

The only solution, the only answer.

But Sasuke would live in Naruto's memory, as immortal as such things are. Held safe in the corners of his heart between Kyuubi and the flame.

He would live with Naruto. Naruto, who like the goldfish, was already dying and didn't even know it.

* * *

- _Fín._ -

Uh, this story was an experiment.

It was also a dream I had ..

_Note: _This story is a lie. It was originally Minato/Naruto, but I got upset at it because it didn't turn out like I wanted, so I took it down and tried to redo it but eventually gave up and just reposted it. And when I did, there was no response, so I got mad at that and wanted to see if there would be a response if I changed Minato to Sasuke.

Personally I liked Minato being in this fic better than Sasuke, I don't think it was Sasuke's place to.. But whatever. I'm too tired of looking at this fic right now to change it back to what it should be.


End file.
